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Viet Nguyen Duc edited this page Mar 11, 2024 · 6 revisions

Download and Install an Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

Using PyCharm (Community Edition) as the IDE

Download and Install Python.

For Windows: https://www.python.org/downloads/windows/

Download Windows installer (64-bit) with the latest version for a particular OS (recommend at least 3.11)

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  • Click Install Now and follow the instructions prompted by the Python setup modal. Python will usually be installed in C:\Users<username>\AppData\Local\Programs\Python<Python Version>
  • Remember to tick “Add python.exe to PATH”

In case the default PATH is too long or you are an advanced user. Select the option Customize installation

In case you forgot to tick the Add python.exe to PATH, be sure to manually add this to your environment variable PATH by following these steps

For Windows:

Search for Edit the system environment variables

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Go to Advanced > Environment Variables

Under the section System variables > variable Path, add 2 new lines for Python. For example

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To verify the Python is installed successfully. You can open CMD and exec the command, it should return the correct version.

$ python --version
Python 3.11.8

Create the project with all needed test libraries.

Open the IDE (PyCharm)

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Create a new project with a Custom environment

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  • This sample uses the custom env type Virtualenv with the base Python installed on OS (above steps).
  • The Virtualenv will be initialized in the project, under the directory .venv

After creation, the virtual environment should be automatically activated. To check, open Terminal (located at the bottom part of your IDE). In the Terminal, you should see (.venv) preceding your current working directory.

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We have created the project, created a virtual environment, and successfully activated it. All we have to do is install the libraries using pip (a package installer for Python).

For example, from scratch the project is empty, run the pip commands below one by one to install these essential libraries.

pip install robotframework
pip install robotframework-pythonlibcore
pip install robotframework-ride
pip install selenium

These libraries will be installed in the isolated .venv of our project only.

One good practice is to save the project dependencies in a requirements.txt file.

pip freeze > requirements.txt

If while working on the project, you decided to add more libraries, you can re-run the same command to save the newly added libraries.

If you decide to set up the same project on a different machine, or the project with existing requirements.txt, you can install all the same dependencies saved in the requirements.txt file. Just a single command

pip install -r ./requirements.txt

Create a .gitignore file to ignore Virtualenv resources and others to reduce the size of the project before pushing to SCM. For example .gitignore contains

.venv
.idea

You are able to launch the RIDE (the IDE exclusive for Robot Framework tests) with the Virtualenv in the project. For example, open the project in Terminal

.\.venv\Scripts\activate
ride

Or double-click to launch .venv\Scripts\ride.py

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